An estimated $6 billion is spent per year by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry to provide one-on-one marketing to physicians using its sales force. The process is highly competitive, expensive, inefficient, and its attendant costs are growing rapidly. This one-to-one marketing is traditional known within the pharmaceutical industry as physician detailing. Detailing costs today are approaching $400 per physician visit, which averages 3-7 minutes of personal interaction time. Additionally, the number of sales representatives involved in drug detailing activities has grown from 35,000 to 70,000 during the preceding 6 years, yet the number of practicing physicians has remained essentially unchanged for the same period of time. The pharmaceutical industry is therefore highly concerned about rising cost trends which, if continued, are viewed as being unsustainable. Indeed, the majority of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies now spend more on sales and marketing than on research and development.
Today's marketing messages to individual physicians are generic and therefore highly inefficient. For example, representatives typically leave samples of newer medications along with published articles or clinical case reports related to safety, cost, or efficacy of the marketed drug, FDA-approved package insert information, and gifts, along with corporate brochures. Also utilized are generic marketing materials in which the marketed drug is compared against a competing drug in terms of various attributes, such as price, dosing, safety, FDA-approved indications for its use, or efficacy.
It is hoped that these aforementioned items will influence MD prescribing behavior. However, the fundamental limitation of these materials is their generic and static nature, which limits the impact they may have on the physician, and contributes to inefficient marketing. For example, generic materials do not typically (except by coincidence) explicitly address the specific needs of patients and specific economic considerations which exist within a physician's practice. For instance, a primary care physician may have 1500 hypertensive patients in his practice who are being treated with a specific high blood pressure medicine (medication “X”). A drug company may wish to market to this physician an allergy medicine (medication “A”), and consider its primary competitor allergy medicine “B”. In doing so, the drug company may leave advertising materials with the physician in which the attributes of allergy drug A are contrasted to allergy drug B. However, B may not even be a relevant competitor to A, because the majority of patients in the doctors practice have insurance company formularies which do not pay for drug B in the first place. Therefore, the more relevant competitor to allergy medicine A is actually another allergy medicine “C”.
Considering this particular line of reasoning, it may also be the case that allergy medicine C, the more likely competitor, has a serious drug-to-drug interaction with high blood pressure medicine X, which is used by 1500 of the physician's patients. In this scenario, a very relevant and powerful marketing message would be that allergy medicine A is safe in the doctor's patients, but allergy medicine C is dangerous. The cost effectiveness of such a message may be orders of magnitude higher than traditional generic materials which are not MD-specific.
Indeed, each physician's practice is totally unique from any other, in terms of the types and prevalence of diseases which exist, and the medications which the MD has chosen to treat those diseases. Because there are more than 500,000 practicing physicians in the U.S., manual determination of the specific and relevant elements within each physician's practice is not feasible on a vast scale. Thus, there is a need for a system which can algorithmically and rapidly determine sales and marketing safety and efficacy information which is specific to the needs of an individual physician's or physician group's patient population, and in which the marketed drug is superior to its competitors.